Internet Upgrade Testing Ground Announced

The National Science Foundation revealed plans to start a project aimed at updating the Internet architecture for the coming digitized society, according to this New York Times article by John Markoff.

This isn’t the first attempt to re-examine the ways in which the current system could be improved, although talk of updating the network – particularly to make it more secure – always raises the hackles of the digerati, who are concerned that ‘secure’ is synonymous with ‘tracking’ and maybe more importantly ‘digital rights management’.

For what it’s worth, though, Markoff’s piece focuses only on the broad goals outlines by the NSF – and not on the particulars, which will surely emerge as this testing ground begins to take shape.

From the article:

Mr. Kleinrock said it would be possible to design a network that was better able to handle traffic from the edge of the network, at the level of individual users. In the next decade, computer researchers expect an explosion of data from mobile and wireless devices as well as sensors that will vastly outnumber today’s PC’s.